Picking a day to harvest the bulk of the plants in the dye garden was a bit tricky. I had to find a moment between letting them have the last of the sun and avoiding any early frosts, as well as making sure I had time to process the plants after picking them.
I had one free week in the middle of September so, following a short spell of warm(ish) sunny weather at the start of September, we planned the harvest for then.
It was a pretty backbreaking day, carefully snipping leaves and flowers from the five big growing beds. Many of the plants still had lots of buds on so we harvested carefully, to allow another late crop if we could catch it before any frost. We had an end of season community event planned too, so hoped we would have some fresh flowers left for that.
My plan was to extract as much blue as I could from the fresh indigo and woad, processing it into a pigment powder to store, and then dry everything else to use through the autumn and winter months.
Another thank you to Sam for his help with bringing all the plants in. It took me the whole of the week to process everything, fill the drying shelves and hang all the remaining stems.
What an exciting moment to get to though. Very much looking forward to bringing some of these colours into my paintings!